lmjohns3☙

In April I got to attend the annual meeting of the
Society for the Neural Control of Movement, a small
but interesting conference that brings together researchers in neuroscience,
physiology, biomechanics, robotics, and computational modeling to discuss recent
progress in motor control.

Twice in the past year I have struggled to get continuous builds and test
coverage set up on Travis
and Coveralls (respectively). The first time was so
frustrating that I just gave up, but last week I finally got things working!
I thought it would be helpful to describe what worked (and why).

I updated my laptop to Mavericks some time ago, and at the same time decided to
make the switch to Python 3. I’d learned that all of my trusted numeric
libraries already worked with the newest Python, and several of the new language
features (yield from, float division, etc.) were appealing. So almost
immediately after installing Mavericks, I set up a Python 3 virtualenv:

This year I’ve become a devoted user of org-mode for
making presentations, using the excellent
beamer package for LaTeX export.
Although this tool set can produce great-looking slides, using open-source
software, without using silly point-and-click tools, it does have a steep
learning curve. Having gone through at least the initial phases of this curve, I
hope that I can help out other folks in their presentation efforts by giving
some pointers here.

As a kid I was sort of petrified of swimming. Not to the point of phobia—I
went to lessons at the Y in Coeur d’Alene and eventually passed the swim test at
camp—but my brother was always the one out on the boogie board, and it was the
bigger kids doing flips off the diving board. I never felt very comfortable in
the water: Jumping in always made my lungs feel like they were seizing up,
something about the coldness and the pressure of the water, and the instantly
terrifying feeling of floating.

It’s March Madness ! I was looking at the brackets for the NCAA men’s basketball
tournament the other day, marveling at the number of upsets in this year’s
tournament. Then I remembered : wait, aren’t there a lot of upset victories
every year in the tournament ?? Particularly in the early rounds ?

At least on Hacker News, there’s
been a healthy debate going for a little while about whether tau or pi is
“right.” Tau, if you haven’t seen it already, is defined as
the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its radius: \[ \tau = \frac{C}{r} \]
Pi, on the other hand, is well-known from school as
the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter:
\[ \pi = \frac{C}{d} = \frac{C}{2r} \]

L and I were gifted a beautiful, red, enameled cast iron pot this spring, for
the express purpose of baking bread. I know, it sounds funny, needing a heavy
pot to bake bread. But, you see, we’ve finally run across the no-knead bread
technique that hit the NY Times / NPR crowd several years back, and it truly is
a lovely way to make bread.

Today I sat down at the Internet Vortex to check out what’s happening on Hacker
News, and I was pleasantly surprised to see Dalton Caldwell topping the
headlines with a
very nice blog post on how Great things are made.
Dalton’s point, from my reading of it, is that people who manage to do Great
things are able to do so not thanks to some grand, unfathomable notion of how
the world works, but at least in part because they have practiced their craft so
completely that it’s become muscle memory.

My first Vipassana retreat was a cold, foggy ten days in late December, 2009.
Not having meditated much, but having thought of doing so often, I figured that
I needed a long period of time devoted to learning more about the practice,
and—even more importantly—actually practicing. For meditation is truly
something that requires practice.